June 03, 2012

A Smart Book – Current Status

In accordance with the Lean Publishing Manifesto, A Smart Book is published as it is written. When I’m happy with a chapter (or even with a section, if it is important enough), I click the Publish button on the LeanPub site and new, updated book is available to all the readers.

Such a book would be of a little use if you would not be able do buy and read it before it is finished. Therefore, you can buy the book in the current state of completion and you’ll get all future versions for free. That way, you can get the information as soon as it is ready and I get feedback from my readers before the book is completed (which also means I can react immediately, fixing the errors and updating the already written parts). You’ll be informed by the email when an update is ready. Alternatively, you can follow this blog or my Twitter feed.

The picture on the right shows the structure of the book. Chapters marked green are already finished. Blue color marks the chapter I’m currently working on. Orange color indicates chapters that are available in the free sample book. Brown color marks the content that is only partially included in the sample book.

If you want to affect the order in which the book is written, go to the home page of this blog and vote in the current poll. The poll is restarted each time new part of the book is published.

To get a better idea about the way the book is written, check the sample PDF.

Code samples for the book are available in the a-smart-book Google Code project.

any chance to see already in the free version - some more information on the complete way from PASCAL to Result on the mobile phone ... may be more people are like me and have to Idea on the whole story .

Looks good so far. I think that you should eliminate unnecessary references to Delphi. I came across at least two examples of this in the book. I'm not going to go looking for them to quote them directly, but they basically said:

1) For Each - Unlike Delphi's For Each statement....2) ASM - Delphi's ASM statement was repurposed for this...

I think that you can perfectly explain the language without Delphi as a reference point. Maybe in some cases you might want to say, "in some versions of Pascal...", or "Pascal developers may be used to....", but I hardly think that is even necessary unless it was something that really deviated from what a Pascal programmer might expect, say, replacing a single equal sign with a double equal sign to represent evaluation.

While a lot of Delphi developers may be interested in SMS, I think you should be casting a wider net. The references I mentioned are really unnecessary as they don't better explain the language and a Delphi developer would likely appreciate the differences anyway.

I know very well that the chapter on Smart Pascal is not a very good reference for one that doesn't know the Pascal yet. Yes, references to Delphi will be expurgated in some far away future but for now I will rather focus on things that are not written yet.

The most interesting chapter of the book for me would be the last one about PhoneGap (which I guess is the chapter about how to create an app for a smartphone and install it). The reason is that I don't really need anything that runs in the browser on my desktop PC (my Delphi programs already run on it) but would really like to program for my Android phone.

Barry, actually that was a mistake in the graphics - "Regular Expressions" was supposed to be included in the sample, not "Graphics". But now potential readers like you are expecting it and I cannot disappoint you so here it is - both chapters are now included in the sample version.